Session 1: Open Session
Sigve K. Tonstad, Loma Linda University, ‘“Restraining”, “Binding”, and “Releasing”: Delineating Agency in Revelation’
On two or three occasions, Revelation uses a combination of verbs that offer much-needed help toward delineating agency. The relevant verbs are restrain [κρατέω] (7:1; 20:2); bind [δέω] (9:14; 20:2); and release [λύω] (9:14, 15; 20:3, 7). In the last occurrence, God-sent angels bind Satan and lock him up for a thousand years. Surprisingly, we are told that “he must be released” (20:3), and he is (20:3). The question of agency is here straightforward. God restrains and releases, and Satan is restrained and released. The same verbs occur in the trumpet sequence (9:14, 15; see also 7:1-3). This paper proposes to see action and agency the same way: God’s side restrains the demonic side, but at some point lets go of restraint. The question of agency is critical to the theology of Revelation lest we make the mistake of assigning the actions of the demonic side to God, as interpreters often do.
Ian Paul, University of Nottingham, ‘Automata and robotics in the Imperial Cult as background to reading Rev 13.14–15’
Revelation 13.14–15, with its language of pyrotechnic displays and animated statues, has long been problematic for readers and interpreters of this text. Some have taken it as rhetorical exaggeration; others (reading ‘futuristically’) imagine it predicting a future age of technological wonders, diabolically harnessed in opposition to the people of God in the ‘end times’.
In fact, historical evidence shows that impressive automata and robotics were a key part of the imperial cult and related cultic activity. The apparent mystery of animated mechanisms functioned both emotionally and psychologically, to support the impression of magical power. Rev 13 offers a critique of the way that technology is harnessed to totalitarian imperial power, and thus potentially offers us a theological resource for thinking about the relationship between technology, power, and domination in the contemporary world.
Session 2: Joint Session with the Johannine Literature Seminar
Session 3: Open Session
Lynn R. Huber, Elon University, ‘Light Space, Good Space? Revelation’s Throne Room as White Mythic Space’
Depicted by John as kaleidoscopic and colorful, the heavenly throne room in Revelation 4 is often represented by modern interpreters, including illustrators and authors of biblical commentaries, in ways that evoke what historian Stefan Aguirre Quiroga describes as “white mythic space.” This describes a space, historical or pseudo-historical, made racially homogenous via the erasure or minimization of the non-White. In this paper, part of a book project on Revelation and Whiteness, I use Quiroga’s framework to discuss how interpretations of Revelation downplay the book’s complex use of color to depict the One Who Sits on the Throne, compared to jasper and carnelian. Engaging ancient theories about color and lapidaries, I argue that the text should be read as depicting a polychrome Divine and that failures to recognize this participate in Revelation’s legacy of racialized thinking. Among the interpretations I discuss are English-language illustrated Bibles, ubiquitous tools for communicating religious and racial ideologies.
Daisy Andoh, University of Edinburgh, ‘Her Whorings and Her Sorcery: Jezebel and Food Offerings in Revelation 2’
In the book of Revelation, the figure of Jezebel is a contentious one. The vast majority of scholarship has assumed that the target of John’s critique is sexual sin alongside the sin of eating food offered to images. This has led to rich research in feminist scholarship that rightly highlights the impact of this sexualised interpretation of Jezebel on the characterisation of women in Revelation and the wider NT.
However, I seek to offer an alternative reading of Jezebel’s story that argues that the coupling of eidólothutos and porneia in Revelation is a rhetorical tool used to condemn the worship of other gods through the eating of food offerings, as opposed to sexual sin. This paper will explore the edicts against food offerings in the Hebrew Bible alongside the Greco-Roman cultural context to demonstrate how eidólothutos is often framed as religious adultery. Furthermore, this paper will argue that Jezebel in Revelation is named as such to link her to Jezebel in 1 & 2 Kings in order to emphasise the sin of religious adultery though the consumption of food offerings. By examining the critiques levied at Jezebel in Revelation within their socio-historic context, this paper aims to challenge the common consensus about the nature of Jezebel’s sin.